Monthly Archives: November 2004

We were sorely disappointed last November when Republican Bobby Jindal narrowly lost to Democrat Kathleen Blanco in his Louisiana gubernatorial bid. Jindal is a 33-year-old wunderkind — a policy wonk with degrees from Brown and Oxford — whose parents emigrated from India to Baton Rouge before he was born. We celebrated the emergence of “Bubbas for Bobby” in the course of last year’s campaign (see “Here comes Bobby Jindal, we »

The Northern Alliance Radio Network will be on the air in around 35 minutes. I highly recommend tuning in, either on 1280 the Patriot in the Twin Cities, or worldwide on the internet. Just click the Northern Alliance link on the left side of the page. (You may need to use Internet Explorer to get the feed.) Regular Northern Alliance member King Banaian is a former economic adviser to the »

We’re big believers in first-hand information. So we’re happy to pass on this email from a reader who is a bond trader in New York, and who rejects the claim of equivalence between Yuschenko and Yanukovych asserted in the Chronicles article we linked to yesterday. It’s lengthy, but worth reading in full: I read with interest the Ukraine alternative view you linked to. I trade emerging markets securities for a »

The world is riveted on events in Ukraine, where fraud in the recent election has been alleged, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have engaged in peaceful protests. Meanwhile, another election is going forward: to choose a successor to Yasser Arafat as President of the Palestine National Authority. Former Prime Minister and current PLO Chairman Mahmud Abbas emerged as the clear front-runner when a popular rival, Marwan Barghouti, withdrew from »

Here in Minnesota, it drizzled all day yesterday. If it had been a few degrees colder, we’d have gotten four or five inches of snow. Sure enough, the temperature dropped overnight, and this is what we woke up to this morning; click to enlarge: The Christmas decorations go up this afternoon. »

New York Times reporter Richard Bernstein brought a gimlet eye to his 1995 examination of multiculturalism in Dictatorship of Virtue. In today’s Times Bernstein profiles the German Muslim convert whose experiences turned her into a disillusioned informant: “The fear born of a much too personal look at jihad.” »

I’ve just caught up with this past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine interview with Elfriede Jelinek — you know, this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. What Yasser Arafat and Jimmy Carter have done for the Nobel Prize for Peace, Ms. Jelinek may do for the literature award. She betrays a weirdness so severe that she subtracts from the prestige sometimes associated with the award. Consider: Why are »

Earlier today, I took issue with Charles Krauthammer’s view that the U.S. should not take a lead role in the fighting if, after the January elections, all-out civil war breaks out in Iraq. The basis for my view is essentially that expressed here, after Krauthammer first made this argument in April. There are outcomes in Iraq short of the single, peaceful democratic state we’ve been attempting to create that we »

As we’ve said, we don’t know much about what is happening in Ukraine. The conventional story line is plausible, but we can’t vouch for it. Reader Mike Kaye pointed out an alternative version of events by Srdja Trifkovic in Chronicles magazine. Trifkovic writes: The media myth: An East European “pro-Western, reformist democrat” is cheated of a clear election victory by an old-timer commie apparatchik. A wave of popular protest may »

We try not to volunteer the fact, but the truth is that we don’t spend as much time reading other blogs as we’d like to. Of necessity, we devote most of the time we spend on our hobby to writing our own stuff, rather than reading other people’s. There is a lot of great commentary out there, however. This afternoon I came across The Diplomad, which describes itself as follows: »

Several readers have pointed out a column by Antonia Zerbisias in the Toronto Star titled “The Pajamahadeens Are Digging Their Own Graves.” Zerbisias finds us bloggers sorely wanting when compared to the stalwarts of the mainstream media: The pajamahadeen are firing their virtual bullets into the cyber-air in celebration of CBS anchor Dan Rather’s announcement on Tuesday that he was retiring as the top talking face of the network after »

I bought a book today (Sharpe’s Rifles) in my neighborhood Barnes & Noble. It was the first time I’d been in the store since shortly before the election. I was struck by the difference: then, the tables were piled high with anti-Bush books. Dozens of them. Today, they had disappeared without a trace, not even in evidence on a remainder table. It was as though the book store (or the »

Charles Krauthammer thinks about the end game in Iraq. Right now, our troops are engaged in an offensive to maximize the opportunity of the Sunnis to participate in the election. If they do not (or if they reject the outcome of the election) the civil war that has already begun will be “institutionalized.” At that point, Krauthammer seems to say, we will need to turn most of the fighting over »

Keep checking Le Sabot Post-Moderne for updates. The latest includes a parallel to our own election: Donetsk is the hub of Yanukovych support (he’s the former governor of the region.) It’s also the center of corruption in the country…. Last night, Donetsk TV was talking about autonomy or secession for the Donetsk region, or possible union with Russia. A bit like the reaction in American “blue” states after the last »

Reader Kim Allen sent us a link to this extraordinary collection of photographic evidence from Fallujah. It isn’t clear to me who compiled these photos, but take a look. It’s the most complete pictorial documentation of the arms caches and horrors of Fallujah that I’ve seen. UPDATE by BIG TRUNK: Several readers have written to let us know that the photos derive from the Marine Expeditionary Force Effects Exploitatation Team. »

Last Saturday we interviewed author Richard Miniter on our weekly Northern Alliance Radio Network program. Miniter is the author of the current book Shadow War: The Untold Story of How the Bush Administration is Winning the War Against Terror. Miniter conducted the interview with us by cell phone from an undisclosed airport at which he was meeting with confidential sources. The element of intrigue was perfect, and he was a »